In a memoir that pierces and delights us, Jill Ker Conway tells the story of her astonishing journey into adulthood—a journey that would ultimately span immense distances and encompass worlds, ideas, and ways of life that seem a century apart. She was seven before she ever saw another girl child. At eight, still too small to mount her horse unaided, she was galloping miles, alone, across Coorain, her parents' thirty thousand windswept, drought-haunted acres in the Australian outback, doing a "man's job" of helping herd the sheep because World War II had taken away the able-bodied men. She loved (and makes us see and feel) the vast unpeopled landscape, beautiful and hostile, whose uncertain weathers tormented the sheep ranchers with conflicting promises of riches and inescapable disaster. She adored (and makes us know) her large-visioned father and her strong, radiant mother, who had gone willingly with him into a pioneering life of loneliness and bone-breaking toil, who seemed miraculously to succeed in creating a warmly sheltering home in the harsh outback, and who, upon her husband's sudden death when Jill was ten, began to slide—bereft of the partnership of work and love that had so utterly fulfilled her—into depression and dependency. We see Jill, staggered by the loss of her father, catapulted to what seemed another planet—the suburban Sydney of the 1950s and its crowded, noisy, cliquish school life. Then the heady excitement of the University, but with it a yet more demanding course of lessons—Jill embracing new ideas, new possibilities, while at the same time trying to be mother to her mother and resenting it, escaping into drink, pulling herself back, striking a balance. We see her slowly gaining strength, coming into her own emotionally and intellectually and beginning the joyous love affair that gave wings to her newfound self. Worlds away from Coorain, in America, Jill Conway became a historian and the first woman president of Smith College. Her story of Coorain and the road from Coorain startles by its passion and evocative power, by its understanding of the ways in which a total, deep-rooted commitment to place—or to a dream—can at once liberate and imprison. It is a story of childhood as both Eden and anguish, and of growing up as a journey toward the difficult life of the free.

True North is the inspirational Canadian Chapter of Jill Ker Conway's life story, which began with her much love, bestselling memoir, The Road from Coorain. Beginning with her departure from Australia, Jill Ker Conway tells of her romance with Harvard House Master John Conway, of coming to grips with his manic-depressive disorder, and of their move to Canada in 1964 where she became the first female vice-president at the University of Toronto. In this vibrant memoir, we watch as a most private woman makes of herself a public persona in Canada.

In this perfect companion for anyone beguiled by memoirs or embarking on writing one, nine distinguished authors -- Russell Baker, Jill Ker Conway, Annie Dillard, Ian Frazier, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Alfred Kazin, Frank McCourt, Toni Morrison, and Eileen Simpson -- reflect on the writing process.

"...substantial contribution to African-American Studies and women's studies." --Mississippi Quarterly "A bravura performance by an accomplished scholar... it strikes a perfect balance between insightful literary analysis and historical investigation." --Eighteenth-Century Studies "... an impressive study of a wide range of writers.... Foster's work is both scholarly and accessible. Her prose is economical and direct, making this book enjoyable as well as instructive." --Belles Lettres "... an impressively wide-ranging discussion of texts and contexts... " --Signs "Foster has written a fine book that provides the reader with a context for understanding the importance of the written word for women who chose to 'set the record straight'." --Journal of American History "... fascinating, meticulously researched... Likely to prove seminal in the field... highly recommended... " --Library Journal " Written by Herself comprises a volume of remarkable female characters whose desires for social change often made them catalysts for spiritual awakening in their own times." --MultiCultural Review "... an outstanding piece of scholarship... Foster's book offers deeply intelligent, provocative, totally accessible analysis of a tradition and of writers still not sufficiently read and taught." --American Literature "Well written and thoroughly researched. Highly recommended... " --Choice The first comprehensive cultural history of literature by African American women prior to the 20th century. From the oral histories of Alice, a slave born in 1686, to the literary tradition that included Jarena Lee and Octavia Victoria Rogers Albert, this literature was argument, designed to correct or to instruct an audience often ignorant about or even hostile to black women.

Jill Ker Conway, author of one of the most celebrated memoirs of recent decades, is also the premier anthologist of women's autobiographical writing. In Her Own Words is Conway's distillation of women's experience from the British Commonwealth world she came from, compared with major themes in women's lives in the United States, which is now her home. In this dazzling collection, we meet twelve remarkable women−from Shirley Chisholm, the West Indian-raised girl who became the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress, to Janet Frame, the brilliant New Zealand writer who overcame involuntary treatment in a mental institution to write one of the archetypal analyses of the post-colonial experience. We learn how the world of politics and the private self intersect in the four offshoots of the old British world, and see how these women have made a difference−by their honesty, by the scale of their struggle for self-knowledge and autonomy, and by the power of their writing. Patricia Adam-Smith Lillian Hellman Rosemary Brown Dorothy Hewett Kim Chernin Robin Hyde Shirley Chisholm Dorothy Livesay Lauris Edmond Sally Morgan Janet Frame Gabrielle Roy

“I promise: you will be transported,” says Bill Moyers of this memoir. Part Mennonite in a Little Black Dress, part Growing Up Amish, and part Little House on the Prairie, this book evokes a lost time, in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, when a sheltered little girl named after Shirley Temple entered a family and church caught up in the midst of the cultural changes of the 1950”s and ‘60’s. With gentle humor and clear-eyed affection the author, who grew up to become a college president, tells the story of her first encounters with the “glittering world” and her desire for “fancy” forbidden things she could see but not touch. The reader enters a plain Mennonite Church building, walks through the meadow, makes sweet and sour feasts in the kitchen and watches the little girl grow up. Along the way, five other children enter the family, one baby sister dies, the family moves to the “home place.” The major decisions, whether to join the church, and whether to leave home and become the first person in her family to attend college, will have the reader rooting for the girl to break a new path. In the tradition of Jill Ker Conway’s The Road to Coorain, this book details the formation of a future leader who does not yet know she’s being prepared to stand up to power and to find her own voice. The book contains many illustrations and resources, including recipes, a map, and an epilogue about why the author is still Mennonite. Topics covered include the death of a child, Pennsylvania Dutch cooking, the role of bishops in the Mennonite church, the paradoxes of plain life (including fancy cars and the practice of growing tobacco). The drama of passing on the family farm and Mennonite romance and courtship, as the author prepares to leave home for college, create the final challenges of the book.

The bestselling author of The Road from Coorain presents an extraordinarily powerful anthology of the autobiographical writings of 25 women, literary predecessors and contemporaries that include Jane Addams, Zora Neale Hurst, Harriet Jacobs, Ellen Glasgow, Maya Angelou, Sara Josephine Baker, Margaret Mead, Gloria Steinem, and Maxine Hong Kingston.